Out of the Kitchen, Into the Vineyard

By HUGO LINDGREN

Published: November 6, 2002

MATTITUCK, N.Y.—
ABOUT three years ago, David Page had a life-altering brainstorm. It happened in the basement of his restaurant Drovers Tap Room, an offshoot of Home, the West Village place he and Barbara Shinn opened in 1993 and had run ever since.

It was summer and humid, and miserable in the basement. The air-conditioner was out; the garbage, piled nearby, was going rank. Mr. Page was talking on the phone with a man about running the little vineyard he and Ms. Shinn had just bought on Long Island, the next piece of their Home mini-empire. They were talking salary.

''I suddenly realized,'' Mr. Page said, ''that I was going to pay this guy to have a better life than I had.''

So changes were made. And that's why a few weeks ago, instead of working the line in the tiny kitchen at Home or punching figures into a calculator, Mr. Page found himself contentedly driving a green John Deere tractor, hauling a load of bright yellow lugs packed with merlot grapes. Ms. Shinn, who might have been running the front of the house at Home, as she did for almost a decade, was directing a 10-member crew in meticulously handpicking grapes.

This was the first harvest for Shinn Vineyards, and besides representing a shift in lifestyle for Mr. Page and Ms. Shinn, it marked the beginning of their quest to be part of the North Fork's evolution into a major wine region.

The founders of the Long Island wine industry, Alex and Louisa Hargrave, established Hargrave Vineyard, in Cutchogue on the North Fork, in 1973. They planted 17 acres of classic European grapes -- cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir and sauvignon blanc -- in potato fields and soon went on to make commercially acceptable wine. Hargrave was followed by Lenz and Pindar, both in 1979, and Bedell, among others, in 1980.

These early producers set their sights high. Their idea was not only to create successful wines and wineries but also to lay the foundation for an entire wine region.

Which is where Mr. Page and Ms. Shinn enter the picture. Much as they adore the dusty splendor of North Fork farm country, they did not move there to hang out and make O.K. wine, just as they did not open Home to hang out and make O.K. food.

In their view, the variations in the maritime climate and topography of Long Island can be exploited to make subtle and complex wines that can stand up to wines from almost anyplace in the world.

Mr. Page is 44 years old, and Ms. Shinn is 40. They met in Berkeley, Calif., 15 years ago; he was a cook, she was an artist and a waitress. They moved to New York together in 1990. They had little money and no prospects but a faith in traditional American cuisine that bordered on the evangelical.

They are a deeply earnest couple, like characters in a Robert Redford movie, and they arrived in New York at just the right moment. They scrounged enough cash to open Home on Cornelia Street, then a seedy lane in a city crawling out of recession, and set about educating their little part of the world in the wonders of skillet-fried chicken and homemade ketchup. Some scoffed, found it overly cute, but Home became a beloved institution, albeit a small one, with 30 seats indoors and 30 outdoors.

The economy picked up, comfort food became a fad and Mr. Page and Ms. Shinn were out ahead of it. They began to diversify, opening a takeout shop, Home Away From Home, and Drovers, a bigger, louder, cheaper version of Home. They wrote a cookbook, ''Recipes From Home,'' bought North Fork farmland and entered negotiations to buy a motel and restaurant nearby.

And then they stopped dead in their tracks and ended the negotiations. ''As excited as we'd been to get to New York, we just ended up almost losing ourselves, these crazy workaholic days,'' Ms. Shinn said.

''New York is like a machine,'' Mr. Page added. ''And we became part of it without even knowing we had.''

Shortly after coming to New York, they visited the North Fork, fell in love with the produce and wine and started promoting both at Home. In 1996 they were married in a sauvignon blanc block at Paumanok Vineyards in Aquebogue.

Deciding that winegrowing was their future, they sold Drovers and the takeout place, and Mr. Page's brother, Chris, moved to New York from Wisconsin to manage Home. ''We needed to hold on to that,'' Mr. Page said. ''It's our cash cow.''

Their 22 acres are tucked between Long Island Sound and Route 48 in Mattituck. They sold the development rights to the town of Southold, ensuring that the land would never be built on, and used the money to plant grapes: cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, malbec, petit verdot, sémillon, two clones of sauvignon blanc and five clones of merlot.

They have planted 16,000 vines, and hope their first harvest will yield about 500 cases of wine, a tiny amount, which they plan to sell through a mailing list. Though they hope to rise to 2,000 cases within a decade, they will still be a boutique operation, the vineyard equivalent of Home. Ms. Shinn, who served a field internship at Bedell, is the vineyard manager.

This growing season had plenty of what passes for drama in the agricultural world. There was no plague of locusts, but it was a little too dry, and birds and wasps damaged some grapes. When autumn arrived and the fruit got too wet, mold became a prime concern, though not much developed.

''It's like a restaurant -- you know something is going to go wrong; you just don't know in advance what it's going to be,'' Ms. Shinn said. ''The advantage of the vineyard is that it's mother nature -- you can't control it. You just have to relax.''

Harvest work is extremely tedious, particularly when you avoid the labor-saving benefits of a picking machine, a choice Mr. Page and Ms. Shinn made: machines don't differentiate between good and bad grapes.

At dawn, they collected their workers, mostly Guatemalans, from a parking lot in Greenport, 11 miles eastward. They gave each one clippers, and the crew worked down the rows, checking and cutting each cluster and gently laying them into the lugs. Ms. Shinn worked alongside them with her own clippers, occasionally spacing out the workers so that they talked less and picked more. Her Spanish isn't too good; neither is their English. The harvest ran from mid-September through Sunday.

Mr. Page collected the filled lugs, stacked them on a flatbed truck and hauled them to the nearby Lenz Winery, where their winemaker, Eric Fry, works. Eventually, Mr. Page hopes to be his own winemaker, but developing a palate and technical knowledge takes time. So for the foreseeable future he and Ms. Shinn will depend on Mr. Fry, who consults for a dozen vineyards.

Mr. Fry's technical ability is greatly admired on the North Fork. He has worked there for 14 years, and his wines -- red, white and sparkling -- have been quite successful. He is 50 years old, wears a shaggy beard and long hair and is often seen in overalls and shredded Champion sweatshirts. His lack of pretense is so complete that it is practically a pretense. It is on his faith in Long Island that Mr. Page and Ms. Shinn base their own.

''I have a bias against everything Californian,'' Mr. Fry said with a provocative air. ''Those big, clumsy, awkward wines with too many tannins and too much alcohol, I don't care for them. What we're able to do here with our cooler climate is make a subtler wine, with less alcohol and more fruit expression. It's better.''

When Mr. Page brought one morning's worth of merlot over to Lenz, the grapes were dumped into a destemmer, which mashed them. The mixture -- juice, skins and seeds -- was pumped into a stainless-steel tank, where yeast was added and the journey toward wine began. After fermentation, it would be transferred to barrels, where it would spend months and maybe years, monitored by Mr. Fry.

If all goes well, Shinn Vineyards' first vintage should be ready for consumption in late 2004 -- about five years since that epiphany in the Drovers basement.

After his trip to Lenz, Mr. Page loaded the lugs on the flatbed and drove back to his farm. He talked about the mini-empire he had owned in the city and why he didn't miss it.

''What I remember from opening night at Drovers was how many people came up to me and asked what I was going to do next,'' he said. ''It was as if we were at a party to mark the closing, not the opening. I didn't know what to say. But now if anyone ever asks me that question ever again, I can point to the vineyard and say, This is it, nothing comes next.''

Photos: TIME TO INHALE -- David Page's Long Island grapes are becoming wine. (Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times)(pg. F1); FIRST HARVEST -- David Page and Barbara Shinn hope for a 500-case yield from their North Fork vineyard -- a boutique operation like their restaurant, Home. (Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times)(pg. F9)